First dance with the Lich King!

So, just yesterday I was fretting on another shaman blog that I feared we had hit a wall with Sindragosa. I don't know if it was the new 10% ICC buff, or just improved raid coordination, but we got her down in just 3 tries last night!

We got to take a peek at the Lich King encounter, which incorporates some unique encounter mechanics, feels dynamic and fun, and has an epic feel to it. I like that his fight seems to incorporate little elements of other WOTLK fights: his Necrotic Plague ability is kind of similar to Rotface's Mutated Infection; healing up a raid after an Infest is similar to healing a target of Lord Jaraxxus's Incinerate Flesh (In fact, I'm thinking of trying to fix up my broken GridStatusRaidDebuff so I can actually make sure the raid is getting Infest taken off).

We got in about 10 attempts last night, and were comfortably getting him into phase 2. Though we're not going to have any more raids this week due to the Easter break, I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get a hang of those Defiles down, and I'm hoping to see Phase 3 next time I'm in there.

From a resto shaman perspective, I found the healing intense. It's not constant AOE like BQL or Sindragosa, but instead it's sudden bursts of intense raid healing. Maybe it's because it was my first night on the encounter, and maybe I was a little paranoid, and overhealing a bit, but I found myself burning through mana like crazy. I am gonna try to set up my shaman_hep parse for my log to just look at the LK encounter, but as it's such an intense fight, and so much longer than the other ICC encounters, I am thinking I'm going to have to rethink my stat weights and trinket choices for that fight, and I may go back to the mana restore meta gem.

So excited to finally get a crack at this guy!

Our Fault, Your Fault: Tier 9 Edition

One of my favorite blog posts from a longstanding member of the healing blog community, Matticus, is his run down of fights in Ulduar.  Basically he breaks down analyzing the deaths in each fight, and assigning blame to either the healers or the guy who died.  Now, this is a little simplistic and fingerpointy, but it gets the point across well, so I thought I'd do my take on it for the newer round of content, ToC and Onyxia's Lair.

Northrend Beasts
If you died to:

• Gormok's Fire Bomb - Your fault. Move out of fires, noob.
• Gormok's Snobold – Raid dps's fault. They're supposed to get this off you, and it should be their highest priority.
• Gormok's Staggering Stomp - If you're melee, probably our fault; Stomp isn't that much damage and it's not tough to keep the melee topped up on this fight.
• Acidmaw's Paralytic Toxin – Your fault, you're supposed to get to the raid member with burning bile (I know some raids do this backwards, but it is not hard to get to the burning bile target if you act as soon as you get the debuff).
• Acidic Spew and Dreadscale's Molten Spew– Again, your fault- this damage is avoidable if you're not the tank
• Acidmaw's and Dreadscale's Slime Pool – Probably your fault, this is like standing in fires.
• Acidmaw's and Dreadscale's Sweep– These two are generally unavoidable, so if you die to these it's our fault.
• Dreadscale's Burning Bile – If you are the one debuffed by Burning Bile and you die to this, it's our fault, because you can't avoid this damage.  If you die from the aoe effect from other people, it's probably your fault.  Don't group up!
• Icehowl's Arctic Breath and Whirl- Our fault. It's healers' main job on this fight to stay spread out around him so we don't all get iced at the same time.
• Icehowl's Trample – Your fault.

Lord Jaraxxus

If you died to:

• Fel Fireball – Our fault. While someone should be interrupting this, it's not that much damage, and one of the healers should be able to dispel the DoT
• Fel Lightning – Our fault, this damage is unavoidable
• Incinerate Flesh and Burning Inferno – Our fault in a big, big way.  Sorry about that.
• Legion Flame – Your fault, so move!
• Infernal Eruption, Nether Portal – Our fault. This damage is unavoidable.
• Fel Inferno – Your fault.  Get out of there!
• Spinning Pain Spike – Our fault.

Faction Champions

Uhhh, probably our fault.  Let's skip this one.

Twin Val'kyr

There's very little healing required on this fight if everyone is on their game.  Only two real things a non-tank could be dying from on this fight and that would be:

• Light/Dark Surge – Our fault
• Light/Dark Vortex – Your fault

Anub'arak

If you died to:

• Penetrating Cold – That's our bad
• Pursuing Spikes – That's your fault
• Leeching Swarm – Our fault again.

Onyxia

I'm gonna make this simple and say:

• Deep Breath, Whelp Aggro, Tail Sweep or either frontal cone ability – Your fault
• Anything else – Our fault.

And a special holiday edition:

Headless Horseman
Just kidding.  If you are a dpser dying on HH or a healer letting people die on HH this is probably not the post for you.

-Zigi